School's In

Last Friday, I caught a great comedy show called “Mrs. Gruber’s Ding-Dong School” at the Gorilla Tango Theater.


Now, it seems I can’t swing a dead cat these days in Chicago without hitting a friend or co-worker who is studying improv and aspiring to be a comedian of some sort. (Believe you me, I’ve tried. And I have plenty of funny friends with claw-marks on their face to prove it.) Their shows are usually decently entertaining. Still, they tend to be improv-based, and/or rely heavily on sex humor and things of that sort. Not that I mind sex humor per se—but it does get less-than-shocking after a while, and a certain amount of the comedy/titillation comes from that thought of “Oh my God! There’s my friend/colleague/co-worker/boss/spiritual advisor simulating a sex act on stage for laughs, and/or joking about Cleveland Steamers! I’ll never be able to look at them the same way again!”

ANYWAY, I went to this particular show because a co-worker of mine is a co-founder of a comedy troupe called Robot vs. Dinosaur. They’d staged this show, and I went expecting the standard stuff. But I got a lot more.

“Mrs. Gruber’s” is really delightful—and, most importantly, incredibly well-written. It presents a series of vignettes that deftly skewers the utopian cartoon B.S. we were all shoveled in our youth. Mrs. Gruber is of a type we’ve grown to love, and then to despise—the wise Mary Poppins type, kindly and innocent, eager to shepherd young children though various life lessons with a wink and a smile and a kindly pat on the head. Only here, the lessons are more realistic, and a lot funnier. Instead of being told “Feed the birds, twopence a bag,” we get a harangue from a schizophrenic homeless man—sung to the same tune—about how fish have lasers. We see the “Diversity Chicken” imploring the children that they don’t have to actually like minorities, or make them part of their lives; they just have to tolerate them. A young cloud gets an important lesson on racism from a gun-toting hillbilly. And, in the show’s best sequence, the “Reality Fairy” shows up to give the kids a little perspective on what they can realistically expect from their lives.

Unfortunately, it’ll only be around for another week. But catch it if you can! I’m seriously considering schlepping back up to 1919 N. Milwaukee, shilling out another $15 bucks, and giving it another go. Even if I don’t, though, I’ll be keeping my eyes on this group and looking forward to whatever they put together next.